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Is "be parented to" grammatically correct?

English Language & Usage Asked by Felipe1979 on April 3, 2021

When "parent" is used as a transitive verb, it should be grammatically correct to use "be parented by" as in the examples in the following pages:

However, I see some usage of "be parented to" in technical documentation or discussion, such as the following:

There seem to be more pages using this construction, but I’m not sure it’s a syntactically proper expression.

Is "be parented to" grammatically correct? If so, could you explain the meaning of it (in comparison to "be parented by")?

One Answer

I think "be parented to" is best in this technical usage. If A, B are two objects, there may sometimes be a relation between them where A is called the parent of B. When we first make that assignment, we say that we are parenting A to B. After it is done, we say A has been parented to B.

Compare other, more common, constructions. We are assigning Classroom A to Professor B. Then A has been assigned to B.

Answered by GEdgar on April 3, 2021

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